Smith School Hosts Top International Service Marketing Conference

College Park, Md. – Oct. 2, 2008 – The University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business hosts the 17th annual Frontiers in Service Conference, Oct. 2-5. Considered the world’s leading annual international conference on service research, this year’s conference will draw attendees from around the globe. The conference is sponsored each year by the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland, and in previous years has been held in a variety of locations, including the Netherlands and Australia. This year’s co-sponsors of the conference include IBM, the National Science Council of Taiwan, the American Marketing Association, and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). The conference will be held at the Smith School’s College Park, Md. main campus and the Hyatt Regency in Bethesda, Md.

Distinguished University Professor Roland Rust, chair of the marketing department at the Smith School and executive director of the Center for Excellence in Service, founded the Frontiers in Service Conference in 1992. It features an international mix of business people and academics, and a cross-functional list of topics, including service science, service marketing, service operations, service human resources, service information technology, e-service, service innovation, and customer relationship management. Speakers at the conference include many of the world’s leading service experts, including high-ranking executives and prominent academics.

This year’s featured speakers include Joe Doyle, director of the Governor’s Office of Customer Service for the state of Georgia; Bob Vastine, president of the Coalition for Service Industries; Barbara Alving, director of the National Center for Research Resources at the National Institute of Health; Chris Volinsky, director of the Statistics Research Department at AT&T Labs; David Hashim, CEO of Veritas Architects; and Mark Haselkorn, director of the University of Washington’s Interdisciplinary Program on Humanitarian Relief.

The conference will highlight the latest thinking in service, particularly those that combine aspects of technology, social science and business. Conference attendees will consist of both academicians and practitioners. Academic research will be presented, and this year a “Best Practitioner Paper” will be awarded to the best presentation submitted by a business practitioner.

Conference founder Rust — one of the world’s top scholars of service marketing — also co-founded the Smith School’s sponsoring Center for Excellence in Service, now directed by associate professor and conference co-chair P.K. Kannan. The center is a nonprofit organization composed of individuals dedicated to service strategy and research. It combines its unique perspective of customer point-of-view and an exploration of a variety of services to provide business leaders and academics with the latest knowledge in service research. The interactive sessions create a lively academic-practitioner dialog.

About the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business
The Robert H. Smith School of Business is an internationally recognized leader in management education and research. One of 13 colleges and schools at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Smith School offers undergraduate, full-time and part-time MBA, executive MBA, executive MS, PhD and executive education programs, as well as outreach services to the corporate community. The school offers its degree, custom and certification programs in learning locations on three continents — North America, Europe and Asia.